This invention relates to household furniture and, in particular, to racks for holding magazines and the like.
In the manufacture of furniture, the conventional practice, when assembling the various sections of a particular piece of furniture, is to permanently fix these sections to one another by means, for example, of a screw, nail or adhesive. While this mode of construction usually allows for the production of a sturdy, durable piece of furniture, it does have certain disadvantages. That is, the process of permanently connecting the component sections of a piece of furniture to one another in the aforedescribed manner is a time-consuming and laborious procedure, to which a substantial portion of the overall cost of manufacturing the piece of furniture may be attributed.
Additionally, furniture constructed in this manner may be relatively expensive to transport and store due to the cumbersome and distended configurations of many pieces of permanently assembled furniture. Close, efficient packing of such furniture, on a carrier or in a warehouse, thus may not be feasible. Consequently, relatively large amounts of carrier and warehouse space might have to be devoted to the transport and storage of permanently assembled furniture, thus also significantly increasing the cost of such furniture. For the same reason, retail stores dealing in furniture may have to allot excessive amounts of valuable floor space to the storage and display of permanently assembled furniture. In further reference to the problem of transporting permanently assembled furniture, it should also be noted that increasing numbers of consumers are required by their occupations to frequently move their households from one part of the country to another. Therefore the high cost of transporting a piece of permanently assembled furniture may have to be incurred not only before it is purchased by the consumer but also on a regular basis thereafter.
Another disadvantage associated with conventional, permanently assembled furniture is that such furniture is usually constructed from a large number and variety of component parts or sections. This production of such a variety of component parts is also a costly procedure. Where these parts are manufactured by molding a plastic, the incorporation of a wide variety of parts in a particular unit of furniture may be particularly expensive since each of these types of parts will require its own mold, which molds are generally only acquired at a substantial cost. Another problem resulting from the use of a large number of parts or sections in a particular unit of furniture is that the cost of assembling the furniture may, if course, increase in relation to the number of parts used. Such assembly costs may increase at a particularly rapid rate where parts are not designed so as to alleviate the necessity that they be oriented in one way, and one way only, before they may be correctly attached to their connecting part. In the case of conventional magazine racks, for example, at least two separate end panels, two separate side panels and a separate floor or base section are usually required as component parts. Further, a large number of fasteners may also be required to connect these component parts to one another. In many cases these side panels and end panels are themselves, made up of a large number of other component parts such as wooden slats or struts, thus still further complicating the construction of conventional magazine racks. It is also true that, in many cases, these side and end panels may not be interchanged with one another so that they may be oriented in only one way before the magazine rack may be satisfactorily assembled.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,606,950 discloses a magazine rack having side walls and end and floor panels. These walls and panels are hingedly interconnected so as to be foldable between a generally flat storage position and an open position in which it will support magazines. Step blocks are required to hold this magazine rack in this open position. This magazine rack has certain advantages over conventional, permanently connected magazine racks in terms of the ease by which it may be transported and stored, but it may lack the stability, durability and rigidity which usually characterize such conventional magazine racks. This folding magazine rack may also have no advantage over conventional, permanently assembled magazine racks in terms of the cost of its production.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide a sturdy and durable magazine rack which may be economically assembled from a minimum of types and number of component parts and which may be assembled without need of any separate fastening means or adhesive.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a magazine rack which may be readily disassembled, then reassembled, so as to allow for its efficient storage and transport.